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The problem and the solution. One of the major challenges facing human resource development is how to achieve organizational impact through the use of I earning interventions. So much has been written about the importance of achieving results from learning, but even practitioners who advocate results-oriented measurements tend to default back to low-level (attendance, satisfaction, and learning) measures in actual practice. This article describes the Learning Effectiveness Measurement (LEM) methodology, which was developed to address the challenge of providing a credible results-oriented learning measurement that would not only help evaluate learning interventions but also increase their effectiveness. The article begins by identifying some of the major limitations of existing learning measurement approaches, and then, it describes the LEM methodology in detail, provides an example of LEM in use, and concludes by showing how LEM addresses the limitations discussed at the beginning of the article.
Keywords: HRD evaluation; Learning Effectiveness Measurement (LEM); business results; predictive measurement; causal chain
Human resource development (HRD) is in the midst of a crisis today that some contend threatens its very survival. Simply stated, the crisis is the failure to show that investing in training and employee development produces demonstrable business results. Despite the more than $300 billion American companies spend annually on training, there are little or no data to show any positive impact of training on business results (Spitzer & Conway, 2002). In fact, most companies do not even try to measure the impact.
It should be disconcerting to all in the HRD field that according to estimates from the American Society for Training and Development (ASTD) and others, only 3% of all training courses are evaluated for business impact, whereas 88.9% are measured by happiness indexes (ASTD, 1995). With only a slight degree of exaggeration, Rutgers University Professor Cary Cherniss concluded that the American industry is spending billions and billions of dollars on training programs and doing no measurement of their effectiveness (Armour, 1998).
For a long time, training and development was accepted as something that was inherently good, and measures of success were the number of programs, number of participants, number of course days, training costs, end-of-course satisfaction survey ratings, and sometimes learning test scores (Spitzer, 1999). Slowly, this situation is changing. Today, there is...